Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
The real-li who capt Merchant
Three misfits trapped arms Mr Big
In a dingy back-street bar in Bangkok, three men clinked their beer bottles in celebration. They looked like men you would cross the street to avoid – and rightly so. The first was a short, stout SAS veteran with a shaved head who spent two decades flying food, weapons and soldiers across Africa in battered Second World War planes.
His drinking buddies were even scarier – a Guatemalan policeman turned drug dealer who smuggled 2,800 kilos of cocaine into Mexico and a Colombian rebel soldier who sold drugs for guns.
Abandoning their lives of crime, this terrifying trio became the real-life A-team.
They had one goal. To arrest the world’s biggest arms dealer, Viktor Bout, who evaded and humiliated MI6 and the CIA for 10 years. And they had just succeeded.
Bout was a former Russian spy who built a £5billion empire selling weapons to warlords and terrorists who used them to kill millions.
His deals earned him the nickname the Merchant of Death and inspired the Nicolas Cage blockbuster Lord of War.
By the early 21st century Bout was the second most-wanted man on the planet after Osama bin Laden, whose terrorists he armed. Yet he proved untouchable until the US government recruited the A-team to trap him in the most ambitious and expensive sting ever attempted.
Author Damien Lewis, whose new book Operation Relentless reveals how they captured Bout, says: “Nobody else could have done what they did. Security agencies from Britain, the US, France and Belgium spent a decade or more trying to get Viktor Bout.
“But it took a team of three guys with chequered histories, poachers turned gamekeepers who lived their whole lives on the edge, to bring him down. It’s remarkable.”
Bout enjoyed a meteoric rise to power using decommissioned Soviet military planes to fly cargo around the world.
He was even hired to transport Belgian peacekeepers.
He hired planes to Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and allegedly to Liberian president Charles Taylor, who was accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But Bout’s golden goose was weapons. His former KGB contacts gave him unrivalled access to Soviet armaments and a network of customers across wartorn Africa and the Middle East.